At 01:53 AM 3/8/99 , Javier Vizcaino wrote:
>Hi.
>
>Not having seen a DVD installed in my life, I have a few
>questions:
>
>1. The most popular hardware mpeg-2 decoding card is the
>Holliwood. How does it connect to the DVD?
>
>2. Is there any video card including hardware (not only
>software) DVD mpeg-2 decoding? I wonder if cards with the
>nVidia Riva TNT chip do it. (The STB Velocity 4400 would be
>a good choice if so, since it includes video output). As
>before, how is the connection to the DVD done?


The back of a DVD drive looks exactly like a standard CD Rom
drive.  You have the power connector, the IDE ribbon cable
connection and the audio wire connector.

It connects into the your IDE controller.  So, what is the
decoder card about?   Simply stated, the DVD video takes a
great deal of processor power.  The decoder card does the
processing and removes it from your CPU.  The Intel 450MMX
CPU or even the 400 or 350 can handle DVD easily...  however,
like any processor intensive hardware or software, some people
still recommend using the decoder card to ease the pressure on
your CPU.

The decoder card has a cable that connects directly to your video
card, a feature cable.  This is similiar to the early TV cards that also
used this feature cable.

No matter if you use the decoder card or not, you will have software
to play the video...  that is a given.   The software player makes all
the difference in the world.

I built two systems recently with PII-450MMX Intel CPUs, STB Velocity
4400 video cards and Toshiba 3rd generation IDE DVD drives.  These
systems played DVD crisp, clean and clear.   The systems had Ultra2
wide SCSI 9.1gig hard drives with onboard SCSI controllers on the
ASUS P2B-S motherboards.  These systems did not use decoder
cards and are functioning great.

   Bob Wright
The NOSPIN Group

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